their struggle with capital to "disputes about material interests." Material issues, he warned, furnished "no more opportunity for heroism than when agricultural syndicates discuss the subject of the price of guano with manure merchants." If he meant that workers should assert control over industry instead of merely negotiating for a bigger share of the profits, his advice made good syndicalist sense. Nevertheless it remained something of a mystery how workers were to assume control of industry without discussing the price of guano and other prosaic subjects. Too much emphasis on heroism could easily divert the syndicalist movement from the question of workers' control to the pageantry and spectacle of strikes, which left behind a legendary history for later generations to savor—as in the case of the IWW in the United States—but nothing in the way of solid accomplishments.

Without the supporting ideology of workers' control, syndicalism could easily degenerate into a mystique of "struggle" for its own sake. Without its "epic" component, on the other hand, it would degenerate in the opposite direction, producing an abundance of "reasonable" proposals for industrial reorganization that nevertheless failed to generate much enthusiasm. The syndicalist movement had to grapple with the same dilemma that had baffled the Christian church throughout its history, the choice between the equally unsatisfactory alternatives of sectarian withdrawal and institutional rigidification. What good was religion practiced only by a handful of zealots, each claiming his own special revelation and acknowledging obedience only to his inner voice? But what good was a religion of public rituals and empty formulas, held together by hierarchical discipline? If syndicalism remained a sect, united only by vows of revolutionary purity, it would accomplish nothing except to save its own soul. But if it renounced the myth of the general strike and began to concern itself with the practical details of production, it would lose sight of the intuition that made it attractive in the first place—that life can be lived on a higher plane, as Emerson would have said.

The point, of course—in politics as in religion—was to hold these irreconcilable elements in some kind of tension, so that neither obscured the other. Only a theorist as disorganized as Sorel could manage this feat very successfully. His most obvious weakness—his incapacity for systematic thought—enabled him to live with contradictions that more orderly minds would be tempted to resolve.

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